Gentle Woman

At some point in the unspecified past, some colleagues and I were profiled in a University publication. This has happened at various times my academic career; I suspect that most us professors show up at some point in some University propaganda magazine, brochure, newsletter etc.

It is always strange for me to read about myself, but some of these articles are better than others (in my opinion) in capturing what (I think) is important about my research and my work as a professor in general. That's not surprising, but what surprised me recently was the dramatic difference between how I was portrayed and how a colleague in Another Science Department was portrayed.

We are both about the same age, both in physical science departments, and have other similarities in our career paths (hence the juxtaposition of these profiles).

And yet, the profile of me talked about my gentle personality (my soft smile, my quiet way of talking about my research passions), an important childhood experience, and how I came to be a professor of Science. The profile of the other professor mentioned millions in grant $ and buckets of publications. The person who interviewed us (separately) never even asked me about grants or publications.

The other professor, who is male, comes across as dynamic, assertive, and awesome in his funding and publishing. I come across as quiet and pleased to be doing some cool science.

This is not just a complaint about the discrepancy in how an MSP and an FSP were portrayed in these profiles, although it is partly that. This is also a musing about how I could have conducted the interview in a different way.

I was quite passive in the interview -- I answered the questions posed, and was only proactive a few times when I felt the interviewer was spending too much time on topics that weren't very interesting or relevant. But I didn't volunteer anything about my grants and publications or any other "metric" of my academic productivity and success. The interviewer had my CV, and clearly knew a lot about my background and career. My grants and publications are listed on my CV, so she had this information. And yet, these things weren't considered interesting or relevant to write about me, but they were for the MSP.

During my interview, which lasted over an hour, the interviewer talked a lot about herself -- her childhood, her life, her travels, her family, her career. I would say that at least 62.5% of the time was consumed by the interviewer telling me about herself. Perhaps this was her strategy to make our interview more of a conversation instead of a list of boring facts about me, but it got to be a little strange when a brief answer from me kept turning into a longer answer from her about her own experiences, some of which were only remotely related to her original question.

I told some colleagues about this later, and all wondered whether the interviewer did the same thing with the MSP and whether, unlike what I did, he took charge of his interview and basically told her what to write. Perhaps because I didn't do this, the interviewer accurately portrayed me as gentle and passive, but I think it was an incomplete, and therefore somewhat unfair, depiction. I think it should be possible to describe me as a soft-spoken person who nevertheless brings in millions in grant $ and who has swarms of publications.

Gentle women can be very busy and productive scientists, although you might not know it to read about some of us.

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Too Cool For Me

Although the word textbook tends to conjure images of heavy, overpriced, boring paper bricks filled with too many facts for any one person to learn in a reasonable amount of time, textbooks are actually quite varied in their style, tone, content, and even price.

Writers, assigners, and readers of textbooks will always disagree about what should go in a textbook, and some people will argue that textbooks are irrelevant and should not be used, much less required. I am not going to get into the textbook cost-benefit argument here, or the issue of whether/how professors assign textbooks and then (apparently) don't even use them. Those are topics of other posts, past and possibly future.

Today my specific subject is related to the content of textbooks for introductory classes. In the drive to make difficult and (apparently) boring subjects more user-friendly and accessible, some textbooks adopt a rather casual tone and format. Some textbooks I have seen recently reminded me of picture books my daughter liked when she was a lot younger -- those books with pictures of animals or construction equipment or whatever and bits of text scattered about to explain each picture.

So I wonder: Is there such thing as too casual in the context of textbooks, or is a 'fun' textbook a good thing if it helps engage the student in the subject?

There are various stages of casual style in textbooks:

- textbooks written in an entirely formal, classic style, with a casual quotient of zero;

- textbooks that are overall serious and classic in style, but with a few attempts at a lighter tone in text or illustrations. For some books, this lighter tone might be signaled only by a parenthetical expression with a "!" as a further clue that whimsy is being attempted;

- mostly serious, classic textbooks that have some references to popular culture and/or that use casual phrasing or images (such as in an analogy) to explain a concept;

- textbooks in which the casual style is a persistent features; e.g., books with cute chapter titles or section subheadings or some attempts at humor in illustrations;

- and so on, along the spectrum to intensely casual textbooks. It would be interesting to hear of examples of the most casual (interpret the term however you want) college-level textbooks in various fields, and what you think of them.

I am not a big fan of textbooks in which the casual aspects are distracting rather than helpful pedagogical tools. I also think that, in some cases, textbook authors might believe they are being cool by coming up with (apparently) clever chapter titles that read like blog post titles, but I wonder if the intended audience of the textbooks (undergrads in an intro-level course) thinks these are cool.. or pathetic?

And I also wonder: Is it condescending to 'dumb down' a textbook because the assumption is that most students can't (or won't) engage with serious topics, or is it a pedagogical best-practice to reduce jargon and try to capture the attention of as many students as possible?

Surely there is a good balance in there somewhere, such that a textbook is not primarily an impenetrable list of arcane terminology, and yet is not so informal that the pictures and words are an incoherent muddle.

I like textbooks that explain things and that don't focus on vocabulary (jargon) so much that the book seems to exist only to leap from term to term (that students memorize). I am fine with lots of pretty pictures and clever analogies. I am trying to overcome an aversion to 'cute' chapter titles in textbooks.

Part of what is difficult for me is that I know what I would have liked as a student, and I am pretty sure that that is not what most of my students today would like. Those of us become professors and essentially never leave school are not necessarily the best judges of what most of our students will find useful and interesting in a book. And yet.. we teach, and many of us do make decisions about textbooks.

I don't want to use a textbook that I dislike and that I think does a bad job of explaining important topics (who does?), but I also don't want to require a textbook that many of my students will hate and perhaps not read or understand no matter how much I try to integrate textbook-reading into the class. That's what can make the Textbook Decision a challenging one for me.

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Read All About It

Today in Scientopia, I ask the burning questions:

• Do you read your campus newspaper?

and

• Is it any good?

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AWOL TAs

Several times in recent months, academic persons at different institutions have described completely unrelated problems with different graduate students who failed to secure a substitute to teach their labs/recitations/discussion sections/etc. when they had be away for anticipated travel.

I have written before about when professors need to miss class (e.g., owing to conference travel) and what we typically do to deal with anticipated absences. My focus today is on graduate students. Some of the issues are similar (the general need to balance teaching and research responsibilities), but some are unique to teaching assistants.

Example: If a grad student needs a substitute for a lab, which may be 2-3 hours in duration, the stakes are a bit higher and the options more limited than when a professor needs a substitute for a 50-minute lecture. The professor could show a highly relevant and entertaining movie, give an exam, or even cancel one class, but these options would not be feasible or advisable for a lab.

Grad students for centuries have routinely traded lab-substituting duties to help each other. It's the obvious thing to do, and if you plan enough in advance, you can work something out.

However, problems arise when a to-be-absent TA doesn't plan in advance and then expects someone to help them out with their self-inflicted emergency. Most grad students are responsible about these situations, and problems are rare. Nevertheless, I have seen the best-if-avoided following scenarios:

- The absent TA makes a last-minute plea to other TAs for help. Some TAs seem to think that it is better if this desperate plea is made afar (e.g., from the conference site) so that their friends can't kill them immediately, but this method will likely result in much anger from peers and professors.

- The absent TA expects the instructor of the class to find a substitute for them. The instructor may be interested in being part of the substitute-finding process (to ensure that the lab will be well taught) and ultimately is the person responsible for the class as a whole, but it's a bad idea for a TA to assume that the instructor will find a substitute for them.

- The absent TA does not find a substitute and the course instructor is reluctant to take this responsibility, so the job of finding a substitute falls to the TA's grad advisor, who does not think it is their responsibility, and passes it back to the TA. That results in a protracted process involving lots of cranky people.

Not long ago, I was thinking about an ancient incident involving TA-substitution issues when I was a grad student. I was reminded of this because I was invited to give a talk at another university -- a university where a fellow TA from my grad school days is now an esteemed senior professor. One term when we were TAs for the same class, we each planned to go to a (different) conference, so we arranged to substitute for each other.

Or so I thought. I taught his lab for him, and he then refused to teach my lab, although he had no schedule or other conflict with the lab time. His reason for not teaching my lab: "I may have implied that I would teach your lab for you but I never promised I would teach your lab for you." Me: "Then why did you think I taught your lab for you?" Shrug. It was my problem, not his.

More than twenty years later, I examined my soul. Had I forgiven him? No, not really.

I don't mean that, decades later, I obsess over his refusing to teach a lab for me after I had taught his lab for him, and it is important to note that this event was not an isolated example of his jerkiness. That is, I am not overlooking abundant examples in which he was actually a thoughtful and pleasant person. He was consistently a jerk. To everyone.

So now, eons later, I was curious to see what his grad students think of him. Are they psychologically damaged by their interactions with him, or did he somehow mature when in a position of responsibility and learn to treat people with respect? What happens to someone who routinely shirked their responsibility as a grad student? Do they become a shirker professor?

Well, in this case, I'd reluctantly say that the results are rather more positive than negative. People (including his students) don't hate him; most even seem to like him. Some of the characteristics that annoyed his peer grad students are seen by his students and others as harmless eccentricities of a professor. He is clearly a jerk in some ways - he still has a tendency to patronize and condescend to colleagues and students alike, for example -- but overall he functions well as a teacher and advisor, and has even won awards.

That's nice. Although I will never like this individual, I like knowing that there is a possibility for personal growth after grad school.

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Different Worlds

By chance, one of my cousins and I have ended up living in the same general area, although we have no other relatives (other than our spouses and kids) within about a million miles. Her husband and I work at the same university.

He has a low-level tech job, and he and I have never intersected in our professional lives. By "low-level", I mean the kind of job that you can get without a college degree. His lack of a degree limits his career options, but he seems to be valued in his job and is increasingly being given more responsibility.

I don't see my cousin and her family very much (according to our mothers, who are sisters), but when I do see my cousin-in-law, it's always interesting talking to him. In our daily working lives, we experience very different sides of the same university.

He frequently encounters administrators who talk about how great [something] is, and then he (infrequently) talks to professors like us and hears The Other Side. For [something], you can imagine a wide range of academic topics, from Big Sports to the latest/greatest 'improvement' to the accounting system. To his credit (says me), he is skeptical when he hears administrators talking about how great [something] is. Our professorial complaints about life in the trenches dealing with the consequences of [something] seem to confirm his cynicism.

I like knowing that someone like him is in the system somewhere. When he sees something wrong or stupid or inefficient about the system, he fixes it if he can. Of course he can't fix the big things and fire the administrators who are big supporters of [something], but he can make some parts of the system work more efficiently.

My cousin-in-law and I inhabit very different parts of the university, but in some ways, the world of the administrators (whom we mock when we get together) is even more distant from our respective planets, at least in terms of views of priorities and functioning of the university. Why would that be?

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An Open Letter to the Math Guy

Following on a recent post about annoying ancillary things we wouldn't miss while on sabbatical, I propose that today we each think about the most trivial annoying thing that routinely afflicts our working lives. Something so small that we might not think it is worth trying to fix. We might even be embarrassed to mention it to anyone but a very close friend or the blogosphere. It might not even make our list of Small Things We Would Not Miss while on sabbatical. And yet, if this annoying small thing went away, life would be better.

Then it would be good to think of a way to eliminate this little annoyance. Maybe we can't solve the tera-problems, but maybe we can eliminate a nano-problem or two. This is what I recently tried to do with a nano-problem.

There was one small thing that was annoying me every single week before a certain class. Instead of dealing with the problem right away, I wrote the following letter in my head each week for many weeks, but never sent it. Eventually, when an opportunity finally arose, I talked to the intended recipient of the letter in person and temporarily fixed the problem that way. Life was definitely nano-better when the nano-problem was temporarily solved, but now I'm back to square one, so I was thinking about these types of little annoyances again today.

Here is the letter I wrote in my head:

Dear Math Guy,

We teach in the same classroom on the same days. There are no other classes in that room between your class and my class, and that is how I know that YOU are responsible for leaving the boards covered (covered!) from top to bottom, left to right, with Math Writing.

The problem (for me) is that you don't erase what you write. Ever. Who do you think erases the board of your equations and annotations? You may not know or care, but I will tell you anyway: I erase the board of your writing. I erase the board at the beginning of my class because I have no choice if I want to write on the board during my class as well.

Oh sure, the students would probably love it if I did not erase the board and instead just projected a series of text slides that they could copy into their notes -- who doesn't love a class consisting entirely of text slides? And if they were bored, they could look at your Math Writing. I could show text slides, but every once in a while, I like to mix it up a bit and write and sketch things out.

Clearly you like to do the same thing when you teach. Maybe we have a lot in common in our approach to teaching. Maybe we would even like each other if we met in person. But we have not met yet, and therefore, at the beginning of every class, I loathe you for a few minutes in absentia.

Perhaps you think I am unreasonable for being annoyed, and that instructors should just be prepared to erase the board at the beginning of class. What's the big deal anyway? Well, for one thing, we have the awesome luck to teach in one of the few classrooms that still has a chalkboard and chalk. Perhaps I wouldn't be so annoyed if it were just a matter of erasing dry-erase marker on a white board. Instead, I end up sneezing and covered in chalk dust at the beginning of my class rather than at the end, and I find that unpleasant.

You may be surprised to know how much you are annoying the person who teaches in that classroom after you. I am sure you don't even think about the effect your non-erasing habit has on the next instructor. You finish your class and you leave, exhilarated or depressed, and probably quite tired after all of that writing and talking.

Even so, I am writing to ask you to take a few minutes to erase the board of your own writing before you exit the classroom. And then I will no longer loathe you for those few minutes each week, and that will surely be a relief to us both.

Thanks in advance for erasing,

FSP


During the brief time when this nano-problem seemed to be solved, I was in a much better mood when I started my class. I could start the class with the key points I wanted to make at the beginning, rather than spending the first few minutes with my back to the class while I erased the board and got covered in chalk dust. Life was definitely better.

Now Math Guy has returned to his evil ways, and I am back to writing this letter in my head (and in this post) until I get a chance to talk to him again. Either that, or the academic year will just end, as it surely must eventually, I will quickly forget about being annoyed about such a small but pernicious thing.

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Let Me Down

At this time of year, some of my colleagues and I like to show each other our favorite "rejection letters" from the recent crop of grad applicants -- that is, the letters that we get from prospective graduate students who decide to accept an offer other than the one from our own department.

I am sure that these letters are difficult for students to write, and it already shows a degree of thoughtfulness to send one. A personalized rejection-of-offer is of course not required; students can just click 'decline' on a webpage and be done with it.

Even so, it's nice that some students send a note of some sort. Some students send a lot of e-mail to potential advisors during the application process, request individual meetings at conferences, come for visits, and basically need a lot of time and care from faculty as they (the students) collect information to make their big decisions. It's polite to thank someone for their time, whether or not you decide to work with them.

The mutual-sharing of entertaining rejection letters is therefore not a mocking of sincere students, but just a weird professorial habit of laughing about some of the stranger aspects of advising (or not advising) graduate students. In particular, some of these letters are interesting for the contortions the students go through in an attempt to let us down easily as they explain that we will, unfortunately, not have the opportunity to work with them -- at least.. not directly. Some students comfort us with the possibility that they will stay in touch, we will see them at meetings, and we will get to see how it all turns out for them in the end.

I have written about this before..

In short, my preference is for a brief and sincere thank you. It's also nice if there's a mention of where the student has decided to go, but there is no need to explain why that was the decision.

In particular, there is no need to reassure a professor that the applicant really does respect them and their work. We do not need to be told that we do interesting research, but.. These 'I actually think you do really good work' e-mails from students annoy at least one of my colleagues, but I think most of us recognize them as classic examples of an academic- letter genre and appreciate the thought, if not the awkward language.

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